In Idea 10 of Oliver Wyman’s “Ten Ideas” compendium, Health & Life Sciences Managing Partner Terry Stone explores how encouraging consumers to make healthier choices will yield big savings and better outcomes. “If the industry could figure out how to do that at scale, backed by the enormous market power of employers and the government,” she writes in “Help Patients to Help Themselves,” “the impact would be measured not just in dollars (roughly half of healthcare costs are related to lifestyle choices) but in years of better living across the population.”

If accomplished, Oliver Wyman estimates the United States could save nearly $500 billion in healthcare costs. That’s more than 15 percent of the $3 trillion health market, as illustrated by the graphic below. Highlights Stone in the video above: “The player in the market that can best help the consumer feel like they give them better value, better guidance and advice, and ultimately make them feel like a more empowered consumer will ultimately be the player who will win in the new healthcare market.”

Christopher Tackett with the Intel Health & Life Sciences blog recently sat down with Martha Thorne, the Senior Vice President and General Manager for Population Health at Allscripts, to discuss the importance of electronic health records and data security and the growing trend toward population health. Above is a video clip of the interview. Read the full interview here. Below is an excerpt from her remarks on trends in population health and analytics:

Population health is a really broad category. It’s like describing the finance category with many applications underneath. We view population health the same way. There are a variety of different aspects of population health, but, ultimately, what it drives down to is providing a way of managing your patients, your consumers, in helping to improve the health status. First thing we have to do is understand what the current state is. We also need to understand how we’re now going to deliver a way to impact that current state and do it in a cost effective way. What we’re starting to see is information being delivered to providers, and then providers can take on a lot of different forms. It might be health coaches. It might be care navigators. It might be physician providers. It could be the surgeons. But we’re finding ways to deliver information at the point of care and where it makes the most sense, so that data could impact that health behavior of the patients.

The second edition of “Ten Ideas from Oliver Wyman” represents the firm’s latest thinking on what it takes for companies to remain relevant to their customers. In the article “Innovate the Experience, Not Just the Product,” Randall Stone, the director of experience innovation, and Rick Wise, the Chief Executive Officer, of Oliver Wyman’s Lippincott brand advisory practice, point out how today’s product innovations, and the growth they create, are often incremental, narrow, and fleeting. Across an array of industries, including healthcare, companies are realizing that redesigning the customer experience – not just traditional product features – is the best way to differentiate their brand and grow. See below how companies, such as health insurance company Oscar, are reimagining the customer experience by introducing innovations that surround the core offer, which can range from enhancements to completely new avenues of growth (click to enlarge):

WIRED Health 2015 was held April 24 in London, bringing together more than 20 industry-leading speakers plus a selection of startups and growth-stage companies working in the fields of medical technology, software, and services. The event was designed to showcase disruptive thinking and innovation in a range of disciplines, from diagnostics and neuroscience to data-driven healthcare and new material sciences helping to re-build the human body. Speakers included Adam Gazzaley, founding director of the Neuroscience Imaging Center, on how video games are the future of medicine and education; Oxford Nanopore CTO Clive Brown on how his company’s USB stick-sized DNA sequencer will enable an “internet of living things;” and Neuroelectrics’ Ana Maiques on her company’s headgear designed to monitor the brain and help patients recover from strokes, epilepsy, and depression.

Venture capitalist and digital health expert Lisa Suennen shares the highlights from her report on the state of digital health accelerators published by the California HealthCare Foundation. Read the full report here. Access the full StartUp Health Now video podcast series here.

In this video posted on Optum’s “Health Care Conversation” blog, Dr. Grace Terrell, Cornerstone Health Care CEO and advisor to the Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Center, shares how her team is using data to identify gaps in care and opportunities for engagement. Other providers offer additional examples of how new healthcare analytics tools are changing clinical and business models.

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Transforming Healthcare is the official blog of Oliver Wyman's Health & Life Sciences practice, offering ideas from OW's global team of experts as well as the latest in trend-bending market news from across the web.